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LITERARY
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ANALYSIS
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Running
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Orders
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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
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Aranda, Aerol Christian

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Burog, Joseph Mavic
Caguimbal, Sierdon Anthony
Cañedo, Hazel Angela
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Ebora, Josh Axl
Espiritu, Ervynn Mattew

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Hernandez, Krystal Lyka
Solis, Jhalexandra

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S11-05
Maria Crecelda Roldan

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 Survival Time
What happens before a military attack in a country? For residents of the
Gaza Strip, it is a simple phone call asking them to escape from an impending
death. How ironic it is to receive a chance to escape death when the said death is
nearly inevitable.
That is the foundation of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha as she wrote the poem
‘Running Orders’. While watching the interview on television of Sawsan Kawarea,
a refugee of Khan Younnis, Lena remembered the words ‘They call us now’ which
became the start of her poem. Even if Kawarea was not introduced in the poem, it
is obvious that her experience affected Lena which then lead to the creation of the
poem.
Written in a first-person point of view, the readers were put into the poem
as if they were in the war between Israelis and Palestinians. It revolved on the
phone call received by Kawarea from a self-proclaimed Israeli military named David
on a Tuesday in Gaza Strip. “You have women and children in the house. Get out.
You have five minutes before the rockets come,” Kawarea quoted David in an
interview with The Post's William Booth. She was asked to leave the house with
her children because only 58 seconds after the end of the message is given before
her house will turn into bits.
Several literary approaches can be used to analyze the piece in biographical,
formalistic, and historical approaches but the specific approach used in this literary
criticism is biographical. The biographical approach focuses on the connection of
the author’s work to his or her personal experiences. This approach helps the
readers understand that the literature is written by an actual person, therefore you
can see how their personal experiences influence or affect the literary pieces they
write. In addition to this, by reading the author’s biography, it could help the
readers understand the work better. According to Benson (1989), a biographical
approach considers a work’s context to take on a different meaning when viewed
through the lens of an author's life. Through this, we can see how the author's life
is consistently embedded within his or her work, consciously or subconsciously. In
relation to the literary piece, based from the author’s biography alone which states
that many of Tuffaha’s poems are inspired by her experience of crossing cultural,
geographic and political borders, it is seen that the pieces she makes are heavily
influenced by her personal life and experiences.
In the three excerpts from the poem, it can be proven how the biographical
approach is used in literary piece. The first excerpt is the first line in the poem which
is “They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings.'' To further
discuss the line, although it might not have been a first-hand experience by the
author, the event of this poem was still based on a real-life experience of other
people which she saw while she was watching the news report. She saw a woman
being interviewed and how she narrated that they got a phone call and the caller
said those exact words at the first line of her poem, ‘They call us now’. As days and
nights passed by, she is bothered by those words that provoke her to start writing
Running Orders.
The second excerpt from the poem is ‘They call us now to say. Run. You have
58 seconds from the end of this message’. This excerpt shows that the author
delivers a real-life scenario of the war that happened in Gaza Strip. Even if she did
not personally experience it, she had expressed the experience of other
Palestinians in this poem. She depicted that the people within the targeted area in
was given only 58 seconds to run in order to escape after the warning call. She
expressed in the poem how fearful and panicking it is to experience this for there
is a given time pressure and rush for the people to save their lives and survive. This
experience had embedded compassion in the mind and in the heart of the author
for she had written it to express her thoughts and worry for the victims.
Finally, the third excerpt is ‘It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re
human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.’ This excerpt was written by the author
on the latter part of the poem. Thinking of the war that had occurred in the Middle
East, the Israel military did not care whoever will be victimized during their attacks
to the Palestine. She wanted to spread awareness of how cruel and inhumane the
Israeli military was for they do not take into consideration the importance of the
lives of the Palestinians. Moreover, she depicted that during her time, the only
thing that the residents can do is to run as the Israeli military wanted them to prove
that they are normal humans who run whenever their scared.
According to Tuffaha’s autobiography, she has lived the experiences of first-
generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian,
Jordanian, and Syrian and because of this, we can see that the author’s personal
life is relevant and is connected to this poem for Lena has lived in and traveled
across the Middle East. A good deal of her poems is inspired by the experience of
crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages and
between the present and the living past including this literary piece.
On the other hand, the author’s belief of peaceful protest is reflected on this
work since according to an entry that she wrote on her website, she stated “This is
a poem that spoke when I could not”. Specifically, the author stated that she wrote
Running Orders at a time when she was losing faith in words. Throughout previous
wars from Palestine to Lebanon to Syria, she always finds comfort in the belief that
art would keep us human. Art would help us witness. As Tuffaha wrote and posted
this poem on her personal Facebook page, it spread to the mass and embodied as
a peaceful protest demanding an end to the violence in Gaza. This only shows that
the writer supports the values of her contemporaries wherein she uses her writing
as an artform in order to connect with many human beings all over the world who
turn to art, just as she does, in order to persevere. As a result, this reflects and
shows the author’s major concern to use her literary work in order to spread
awareness of all the chaos and wars happening which she achieved. As this poem
traveled and reached a mass audience through social media it has been translated
into many languages including Greek, Hebrew and Spanish. Running Orders has
lived in the world in the most powerful ways. It has been used as a prayer, a
testimonial, or a rallying cry as a demand to end the violence in Gaza.
The event of the bombing may not have been a first-hand personal
experience by the author, but the writing reflects real life events. An entry of the
author from her website states that “In the summer of 2014, I spent many hours
glued to various screens, helpless and disempowered yet another war on Gaza
began. In the beginning, I engaged and wrote letters to editors, called my elected
representatives, and shared all the information I could on social media sites. I
participated in weekly protests in my city. But with each passing hour, with each
attack more ferocious than the one before, I felt my words withering away. Among
the many news reports that I watched, I remember an interview with a woman who
described a phone call that she and her neighbors had received from the Israeli
military. "They call us now," she said. For days and nights those words played over
and over in my head. And I began to write.” This makes it the event of her life that
really corresponds to the story. The inspiration from the words of the woman which
led her to think about the irony of a phone call announcing an impending death
from which there was no chance of escape was what made her sympathize about
the situation. In her own words, she said, “Sometimes you search for the words to
write a poem. And sometimes the words of a poem find you.”
Lastly, the characters in the story correspond to real people since there were
actual people being called by the Israeli military that warned the people about the
bombing that was going to happen. An example of the military in the poem is David
who was the person who called to tell them to run and they had 58 seconds after
the message. Furthermore, the woman in the interview and her words inspired the
author to create the poem. This makes her the embodiment of the person who
had all those thoughts.
 Running Orders
BY LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA
They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first
name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms
and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in
Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end
of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war-time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders
are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life
sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t
in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for
this week
counting candles left in case the
power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have
children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost
completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had
planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run
 Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Tuffaha writes poetry, essays, and translations. Her first book of poems,
Water and Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for
Poetry. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize for her chapbook Arab in
Newland. Her essays have been published in the Seattle Times, Al-Ahram Weekly,
and Kenyon Review Online. She translated the screenplay for the multi-award-
winning feature film When I Saw You, written and directed by Annemarie Jacir, and
Lena translated I Am A Guest on This Earth by Iraqi poet Faiza Sultan, published by
Dar Safi Press.

References:
Benson, J. (1989). Steinbeck: A Defense of Biographical Criticism. College Literature,
16(2), 107-116. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111810

West, B. (2011). Biographical Criticism | Angles of Literary Approach. Retrieved 22

October 2019, from
http://blogs.dickinson.edu/anglesofliteraryapproach/category/biographical-
criticism/

Tuffaha, L. Running Orders. Retrieved 22 October 2019, from

https://www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com/running-orders.html